


Gone Without A Trace

by Kastaka



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-18
Updated: 2013-08-18
Packaged: 2017-12-23 22:46:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/931975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kastaka/pseuds/Kastaka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Instead of taking up a place on the Enterprise, Carol heads out into the frontier with Christine as maintenance technician to her frontier nursing...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gone Without A Trace

**Author's Note:**

  * For [diadelphous](https://archiveofourown.org/users/diadelphous/gifts).



The console bleeped urgently.

"I'm going to run through the last of our supplies," declared Christine, "and stabilise as many as we can. At least give them all a couple of days to find local treatment facilities once they're off life support."

Carol didn't waste time arguing. It was probably a pointless gesture, in most cases; 'local treatment facilities' were generally no better than warehouses for the sick, since the planetary government had gutted them for the same reasons they were coming for the Federation clinic.

She'd already taken the emergency transponder, activated it and hidden it away in the family home of a grateful ex-patient. The cavalry would be coming as soon as they could. But all the way out here, and with Starfleet still desperately rebuilding, they couldn't rely on a swift rescue; and their patients were unlikely to benefit from any kind of rescue.

Now it was time to implement the final stage of the plan she'd been putting together since she first noticed the Essentialists begin their rise to power. By the time she was through with it, none of the technology at the clinic would be of any use to the strangely always 'essential' business of killing other sentient life forms.

She hesitated for a moment before pocketing the tiny data wafer. It could conceivably be studied - the very structure of it was more advanced than anything this backwater could produce for itself, and some of the details encoded therein could probably be weaponized into hideous bioweapons. 

But they had been so close. She couldn't bring herself to abandon the data.

The lights on the administration console went dead; a subtle note of burning plastic began to pervade the clinic's air. One by one, chasing Nurse Chapel across the facility, the lights on the beds winked out for the last time.

Carol lifted a panel and disengaged the manual interlock securing a small locker space. She retrieved two long, military weapons from within, phaser rifles issued to the clinic in case of dire need. For a moment she just sat before the locker, the guns in her lap, helpless before the decision that they needed to make.

"It's not going to do any good," Christine concluded, her rounds of the patients completed.

"They won't get into enemy hands. I can wire them to blow..."

"And how will that help?" asked Christine, squatting down next to her. "Will it make you feel any better to injure a few helpless recruits?"

"They can just destruct internally," said Carol. "And we can keep them on non-lethal."

"And when they fall down and hit their heads?" Christine replied. "If there was anything to buy time for, I would stand with you and we'd see what we could do. But I've finished my last rounds. You've destroyed everything they could use. Help isn't arriving that imminently. It's over, Carol."

"One of us should slip out the back," Carol said, calmly. "Take the data. Lie low somewhere. I could buy time for that."

"Shouldn't both of us try that?" asked Christine, cautiously.

"Not with the data," replied Carol. "If we only had ourselves to protect, absolutely. But one of us has got to get away with this. One of us has to have the better chance."

"You're saying 'one of us'," said Christine, "but I can hear what you're really saying."

Carol reached into her pocket, and handed over the data chip, with an air of great solemnity.

"I'd say that I should argue," Christine said, "but we both know it'd be a waste of breath. Don't think it means that... that you mean any less to me."

"Sure," replied Carol, already distracting herself with some fiddly modification to the gun on her lap.

"Both of them," Christine warned her. "You won't be doing me any favours by getting into a fire-fight."

"It might distract them for longer," protested Carol. "I can make these do some serious tricks, you know."

"I expect to see you on the shuttle we take out of here," Christine admonished her. "In one piece and without any nasty laser or bullet wounds. No heroics."

"Hadn't you better be going?" asked Carol; but she had moved onto the second gun, placing the first gently on the ground, and the first was quietly melting itself into a pool of unusable slag.

"Love you too," replied Christine.

The nurse could be quite silent when she wanted; when Carol looked up from her task, she was gone without a trace.

\----

"Did you know their forcefield generators were so terrible?" Carol asked her, quietly, as they sat in the hayloft of a technologist sympathiser.

"No," replied Christine, "but I did know that if one of us could stage a prison escape, it wasn't going to be me."

"Rubbish," insisted Carol. "You'd have just done it differently. Impressed the inmates with basic medical attention and staged a prison riot, or something."

"I just wish we could do more for our hosts," worried Christine. "I mean, they obviously appreciate someone who knows their way around a dermal regenerator, but..."

"I could make them weapons," smiled Carol. "I'm sure they would appreciate that. Maybe it would even be enough to overthrow the regime; you know how much damage they're doing."

"And you know it's no more than a revolutionary change of government would do," Christine replied. "This isn't our game to play, anyway, and you know that, or you wouldn't be smiling."

"Some day soon, they'll whisk us away from here," said Carol, wistfully gazing at the barn roof. "They'll wait until the planet's clean and then they'll try again."

"There are some children still living to adulthood, you know," retorted Christine. "The population is more likely to get immune to the disease, eventually. We were never here to 'save' them. Just to stop the children suffering so much on the way."

"'Just' to?" questioned Carol.

"Sometimes you've got to keep a broad perspective," Christine tried, but she was looking at her hands and the light-heartedness had gone out of the conversation.

"It's not your fault they came for the clinic," Carol told her. "It's not your fault we couldn't finish our work here."

"That doesn't really make it any better, does it?" Christine asked. "Plagues and diseases aren't known for respecting culpability."

Carol raised a hand and ran her fingers through Christine's tangled blonde hair, letting the motion come to rest on her shoulder.

"We can still fix it," she asserted. "We can still make it better."

"Only a little," replied Christine. "Only in places."

"We won't run away," declared Carol. "We were so close. If we can tether whatever vessel comes to rescue us for five, ten days..."

"They'll need to move on," Christine protested. "Every warp-capable ship we can get out here has a massive list of things to be doing; people who weren't as resourceful as us, for a start, to rescue; colonies to resupply; more tractable medical emergencies to attend."

"They wouldn't write these people off if they were Starfleet," Carol replied. "Or even if they were humans. We can make them spare five days for this."

"You can," Christine said. "I'm just cargo, when you get me into space. Maybe I can help out in their infirmary if I'm lucky."

"Oh, Christine," smiled Carol, ruefully, brushing the nurse's hair gently back out of her face. "Nothing useful could have been done here without you. Nothing useful would be achieved by delaying our rescuers without you. You're not cargo. You're _payload_."

And at that moment, the familiar whine of the transporter beam caught them both up into the long-awaited rescue vessel.


End file.
